“So how are you feeling, settling back into your life?”
I smile broadly. The new me is open and expressive. “Tentative, but hopeful, really hopeful.” I’ve learned to always list more than one emotion when asked. It’s more believable.
“That’s good,” she says reassuringly. “It’s okay to have some mixed emotions. And I’m glad you admit that you feel tentative.” She smiles at me and there’s a long silence in the room. My hands start to sweat slightly. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because I’m thinking I should say something. But I’m also thinking that therapists believe silence is okay. So I am actually not being silent, but manipulative and controlling. Once again, an alcoholic specialty.
“How was your experience at Proud Institute?” she asks.
She’s the first person to say that name since I’ve returned. “It was very intense,” I tell her. “At first, I wanted to leave. My first impression was not a good one.”
“But you revised your opinion?”
I nod my head. “Yeah, that’s an understatement. I never expected it to be so intense. It was like emotion, emotion, emotion half of the day. And facts, facts, facts the other half. It was like Jerry Springer meets medical school. I mean it’s not like I had some great moment of truth or anything. More like a lot of little ones, gradually. Although I did really realize I’m an alcoholic, so I guess that’s happened.”
“I’ve heard that from many, many people.”
This makes me want to ask her if she’s an alcoholic. That she’s “heard” it implies she hasn’t experienced it herself. I don’t want a therapist who has only textbook knowledge. I want a therapist who lost a leg in the war. Someone who has been there. And this doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Every woman I know goes to a female gynecologist, after all. They don’t want some guy poking around in there.
“So, what made you go into chemical dependency counseling?” I ask, as if I’m interviewing her for a position at my Scarsdale facility.
“What makes you ask?” she asks back.
“I guess it’s not my business, but I was just wondering if you have personal experience with addiction.”
“Would it make a difference with your program whether I have or have not?”
I feel trapped. If I say, Yes, my mental health is possibly connected to whether or not you are an alcoholic, then I am not taking responsibility for my mental health. If I say, No, it makes no difference to me, she’ll wonder why I asked in the first place. So I give her an advertising copywriter answer; I give her a weasel. “It was just a thought that passed through my head. I’m new to this ‘emotions’ stuff, so I’m making an effort to say just exactly what enters my mind. Right or wrong, good or bad, relevant or not.” I shrug and smile.
“I think that’s a great idea,” she says. “For you not to self-edit is exactly right.” Then she says, “So, have you been to AA yet?”
I think, I have to be more careful with what I say.
I come home and find myself feeling less than positive. Feeling that I just want to disappear. I feel disconnected, or like I am on PAUSE. I’m restless, but not energetic. Depressed? I think back to the feeling chart. I decide I am borderline panicked, but also I feel homesick or something else; lonely. Then I get it.
I miss alcohol.
Like it’s a person. I feel abandoned. Or rather like I’ve walked out of a violent, abusive relationship and want to go back because in retrospect, it wasn’t really all that violent or abusive. They told me in rehab that this happens. That out of the blue your moods can change. They also said it would be like dealing with a death in the family.
I turn on Channel 18, the Discovery Channel. Zebras. The announcer says, “. . . the female zebra is winking her vulva to attract a mate.” Sure enough, it winks.
Then the boy zebra mounts the girl. And I think, Why do they call it ‘hung like a horse?’ It should be ‘hung like a zebra.’ Its penis was at least half the length of its body. The zebras fuck.
It occurs to me that my sober life now includes watching animal pornography.
Depressed, I shut the TV off and go to sleep. I dream about winking zebra vulvas and swinging zebra penises all night long.
I wake up feeling relief that I am not dreaming anymore. Also, this slight feeling of being high, realizing I’m not hungover. This is one of the more pleasant side effects of not drinking.
I spend the day trying to live in the present at the office. Things that would have annoyed me before, I now let pass over me. I practice acceptance. I return phone calls. When I am asked to write body copy for somebody else’s ad, I say, “Sure.” As opposed to saying, “Get the hell out of my office.”
For lunch, Greer and I walk to a salad bar. I create a salad from dry spinach leaves, raw broccoli florets, zucchini slices as thin as matchsticks, and a small scoop of low-fat cottage cheese. I am eating like a girl, trying to accelerate the loss of my booze gut. I’m amazed by how quickly I was able to lose most of it. Now, it’s mostly just loose skin. The actual gut is mostly gone. I do a hundred situps every day and go to the gym four times a week, as required for a Manhattan guy who is into guys. If you’re gay and live in New York and don’t go to the gym, eventually they come for you. The Gym Rats from Chelsea come in their Raymond Dragon tank tops and haul your ass into the back of a Yukon. You wake up hogtied in a bathroom stall at a Red Lobster in Paramus. A sign around your neck reads, DO NOT DRIVE ME INTO MANHATTAN UNTIL I HAVE PECS.
Greer eyes me with contempt when she sees my lunch. She has also made a salad, but hers is topped with crumpled bacon and blue cheese dressing. “How can you deprive yourself like that?” Greer wishes she could deprive herself like this. She is very tall and thin as it is. She does not have to worry, but she worries. She obsesses.
“It’s easy,” I tell her. “If I can’t have alcohol, not having anything else is a breeze.”
I’m learning to appreciate the differences between brands of bottled water. Evian is too sweet. Volvic is crisp, clean. Poland Springs is also good. But Deer Park tastes like plastic.
We take our lunches back to work, go into Greer’s office and eat them. “I’ve noticed a change with you already, and you haven’t even been back all that long,” she says.
“Like what,” I say, forking dry spinach into my mouth, machinelike.
“Like you’re less angry.” She stabs a large chunk of bacon with her fork, then rolls it against a morsel of blue cheese.
“I feel . . . transformed in many ways,” I say. “I realize it’s about letting things go, and not adding more things.” And the fact that I realize this surprises me. I hadn’t really expected to realize anything or change in any positive, meaningful way. But somehow, something sunk in.
“What do you mean, letting things go?” Greer asks.
Because she is asking questions, I feel almost like a minister, like I need to preach and convert. “Well, by getting rid of the alcohol, it’s like I have lost this thing that took up so much of my life and caused too many problems, directly and indirectly. You know, the butterfly thing.”
“What butterfly thing?” she says.
“You know how when a butterfly beats its wings in the Amazon, this sends a mote of pollen through the air which causes the wild bore in wherever to sneeze which creates a breeze which, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, all ends up affecting traffic in LA or something. I forgot how it works exactly.”
“Oh, yeah,” Greer says. “There was a Honda commercial a few years back like that.”
I roll my eyes at her Greerness. “I just feel like I have less baggage and so, I don’t know, I’m able to just accept things more, not have to fight them. Don’t fight the river, go with it.”
“God, you do sound transformed.” She dabs the paper napkin against the corner of her mouth. Then she abruptly looks down at it. “Speaking of the rain forest,” she says. “Poor napkin.”
As we finish our lunches, I feel this little flame inside of me. This proud little flame, beca
use even though it’s new, I do feel transformed. The technical term is Being on a Pink Cloud. I hear the only trouble with Pink Clouds is that eventually you fall off.
After work, I head straight to HealingHorizons for my first Group. For the first fifteen minutes, it’s exactly like rehab. Because I’m new, they go over the rules of the group, all of which I already know: no crosstalk, no handing tissues to someone if they cry, “I” statements. We go around the room introducing ourselves, saying a little bit about our lives, how long we’ve been sober. But after fifteen minutes, the door swings open, this guy walks in and everything changes.
The first thing I notice about him, the first thing anybody would notice about him is the plain fact that he is what a magazine might describe as painfully handsome. He’s got jet-black hair, husky-blue eyes, a strong nose, a strong chin, dimples—all of it. Yet, he’s a little rough around the edges; five, maybe six o’clock shadow, tousled hair, rumpled clothes. But he looks sloppy almost as if a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-day prop-stylist made him look this way. He apologizes for being late as he makes his way over to an empty chair by the window. His voice is deep, low-country South Carolina. “I’ve had an awful day,” he begins, taking over the room. But nobody seems to mind. In fact, everybody is looking at him, spellbound. So am I. Every few seconds his eyes twitch, a nervous tic. I have the exact same nervous tic. This is truly appalling.
Foster is his name. He’s thirty-three, a crack addict/alcoholic who doesn’t need money and thus has too much free time on his hands. He has a small, vague job for just this reason. He’s living with a physically abusive alcoholic illegal alien from London named Kyle. And from what I gather, he’s trying to get the guy to move out. “I almost used last night,” he says. “After work, I got off at two A.M., I was just dreading going home to him. So I went up to Eighth Avenue and I was going to score some crack. I was out of control and I was going to do it. But then, this hustler I know, the guy I was going to buy the crack from, was arrested right before my eyes, just as I was about to come up to him.” Foster exhales, tosses his head back. I look at his Adam’s apple, the dark razor stubble that shadows his neck. “It just really knocked the wind out of me.”
He runs his fingers through his hair. He doesn’t seem to actually look at anybody in the room, make eye contact. Just shifts around in his seat, fidgets. He’s in his own world.
The moderator of the group, Wayne, asks the room, “Would anybody like to give Foster any feedback?”
An older man to my left says, “I’m glad you didn’t use, Foster. I’m really glad you didn’t use.”
Foster mouths a quick Thanks and slumps lower in his chair.
For a moment, the room is silent. Watching him. I mean, handsome people are always interesting to watch. But a handsome person in crisis is riveting.
“You know,” Foster begins with almost a manic level of intensity, “I just want go kayaking in the Florida Keys, get a black lab, grow tomatoes, have a life. I don’t want all this craziness. I don’t want this insanity. I’m really sick and tired of it.” He pounds his fist on his thigh.
His eyes dart around the room. He glances over here, over there and then at me, and then on to someone else, but he sort of skids into a double take and turns back to look at me. He stares at me for what feels like a very long time and I think, Do I have something hanging out of my nose?
“Hey, I’m sorry I was late. What’s your name?” he asks as he gets up out of his chair and comes over to me, hand extended.
“Augusten,” I tell him, discreetly wiping my hand on my jeans before taking his hand to shake it. My heart is racing. He is thrilling.
“Augusten,” he repeats. “Augusten. What an interesting name. You mind if I call you Auggie?”
“Auggie is fine.” I repress the urge to smile at my delight over having just been given a pet name by this man.
He smiles back. “Great,” he says. “Welcome to Group.”
He sits back down and Group continues. For the next hour and a half, I am aware that he is watching me.
When Group is over, we all pile into the same elevator and nobody says a word. That’s the strange thing about elevators, it’s like they have this power to silence you. I’ve just been in group therapy where people will reveal the most intimate details of their lives to complete strangers, yet in the elevator nobody can say a word.
Outside, people exchange good-byes and see you soons, and head off in different directions.
I make a left toward Park Avenue and I can feel Foster a few beats behind me. Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me, I am psychically commanding him.
But he doesn’t. At Park, he heads north and I head south.
I walk the ten blocks home thinking about Group, specifically this Foster guy. I realize I’m excited for Thursday, the next Group. I realize Foster is the reason why.
I go straight to Perry Street AA. Tonight, the speaker is talking about how people in recovery are always looking for these big, dramatic miracles. How we want the glass of water to magically rise up off the table. How we overlook the miracle that there is a glass at all in the first place. And given the universe, isn’t the real miracle that the glass doesn’t just float up and away?
THE BRITISH INVASION
H
ayden calls from rehab, collect. I accept the charges.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he says in that British lilt that I miss as soon as I hear.
“Really? What are you going to do, where are you going to go?”
Silence. Then, “Well, I really don’t have anywhere to go, except home to London, but I’m not ready for that yet. So I was wondering . . .” He drifts off. “Well, I was wondering if maybe I could stay with you, just for a little while, just until—”
I cut him off, unable to contain my excitement. “Yes, I would love it.”
“Really?” he asks.
“Come immediately. It’ll be like a minirehab.”
It’s decided that he will arrive tomorrow night, at eight. After we hang up, I walk around my studio apartment, grinning like a crazy person. It’s a tiny apartment, but no smaller than the rooms at rehab, and three of us fit into those at a time. Hayden can sleep on the sofa, like a pet.
He can curl up at night with the stuffed animal I will get for him.
At work the next day, we’re informed that we are finalists in the review for the Wirksam beer account. This means that instead of pitching against seven other agencies, it’s down to three.
“I have a really good feeling about this,” Greer confesses. Then, “It’s really too bad about Fabergé.”
Our perfume client has decided not to launch a new perfume. The account has gone into remission. I feel spared and am relieved that I don’t have to work on that account. I want to be as far away from Fabergé eggs as possible.
“Yeah, bummer,” I say sarcastically.
At work, Greer has a copy of Entertainment Weekly on her desk and I thumb through it. It’s amazing how many of the celebrities in there remind me of Foster from group. I’m hit by a pang. A pang of what, exactly, I’m not sure.
“I don’t like Meg Ryan,” Greer announces.
“Why?”
“I just don’t buy her ‘I’m so together’ bullshit. I think she’s really a very angry person inside.”
“Oh . . . kay,” I say. “We’re not projecting, are we, Greer?”
“Oh, fuck off,” she says.
Good. That’s the Greer I know and love.
I glance down at my desk drawer and there’s something sticking out, so I open it. The drawer is crammed with pages torn from magazines. “What the?” I say as I pull the pages out, unfold them. It takes me a moment to see that the pages were not just randomly torn out. They are beer ads. “Did you do this?” I say to Greer.
“Do what?” she says, leaning forward.
I unfold one of the ads, an ad for Coors, and show it to her. “This. Did you stuff all these in my drawer?”
“That’s weird
,” she says in a way that makes me know she’s innocent. “Why would someone do that?”
I crumple them up and shove them into the trash can. I try to dismiss it as some sort of weird joke, but I can’t shake the creepy feeling. Somebody went to a lot of effort to pull those ads from magazines. Somebody put some real time into it.
It’s like something I would do myself in a blackout.
Hayden’s plane is delayed six hours. He arrives at two in the morning. We have a late dinner at a twenty-four hour restaurant in the East Village and then stay up until five, talking maniacally. Plotting, planning our sobriety. It’s amazing how drunk you can be without alcohol.
It’s unclear how long Hayden will stay. At least a couple of weeks. I’m thinking even a month or perhaps for the rest of my life. The only thing is, we made this agreement: if he relapsed, I have to ask him to leave. I can’t imagine him relapsing, because he’s so determined. And I know that I certainly won’t. Once I put my mind to something, that’s it. Of course, that was the whole problem in terms of cocktails.
I feel incredibly euphoric tonight. This must be that glorious Pink Cloud, God-rays shining through. With Hayden’s suitcases opened next to the sofa, and the sofa turned into a makeshift bed, the room feels highly occupied. I’m glad I’m not alone; instead of feeling cramped, I feel secure. At around five-thirty we crawl into our respective beds and sleep.
My alarm clock goes off at nine and wakes us both up. “Do you feel hungover?” I ask Hayden groggily.
“I most certainly do,” he admits.
“I don’t mean tired, I mean—”
“I know exactly what you mean,” he interjects. “I feel like I drank a bottle of wine. I even feel guilty.”